I had some fun putting this slide together quickly for a recent presentation. Regulars here can probably name everyone below, but most people probably only know those on one side. Any others to add or switch? For instance, I forgot Brooksly Born, who warned about dirivatives years ago.

Agreed mostly idiots populate the right hand side - but think it naive to put Mr Cheney there.

A couple of things to think about?

1. If it not for Peak Oil - would it have been worth invading Iraq ?

2. Why was one of the first acts of the "Bush" presidency in 2000 to convene the secretive "Energy summit" ?

Tom Therramus

I love getting the historical context right, and you are right. Between the (+++) signs below is a snippet from an article I wrote back in 2006, back when there were virtually no warning signs on our economic radar screens.

As soon as I had read the following quote by Dick Cheney, I never again doubted what the motive for the Iraq war truly was, nor the fact that Peak Oil is real and that DC knows all about it.

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Back in September 1999, a full year before the US elections, which made him the most powerful Vice President in history, Cheney gave a revealing speech before his oil industry peers at the London Institute of Petroleum. In a global review of the outlook for Big Oil, Cheney made the following comment:

“By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and the national oil companies are obviously controlling about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business.

While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world‘s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies. Even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow. It is true that technology, privatisation and the opening up of a number of countries have created many new opportunities in areas around the world for various oil companies, but looking back to the early 1990‘s, expectations were that significant amounts of the world‘s new resources would come from such areas as the former Soviet Union and from China. Of course that didn‘t turn out quite as expected. Instead it turned out to be deep water successes that yielded the bonanza of the 1990‘s.”

One does not need to be a linguistic expert to read between the lines….Cheney was laying out the power framework for the next few decades and he clearly thought (and rightly so) that it centered on access to oil, and Middle Eastern oil in particular. Further, he makes clear that in 1999 the calculus of diminishing production and rising demand had already been converted into a strategic policy framework.

And so, we might speculate that the current DC ‘leadership’ is all too painfully aware of the implications embodied within Cheney’s quote above and the reason that we are seeing zero positive activity at the national level on these issues is because nobody has a plan. Or possibly there’s a set of super secret plans that can’t be shared with the little people because we might do something irresponsible with the information such as stop buying stuff that we don’t need with money that we don’t have.

I am in the camp that believes that plans exist. Strategic plans, tactical plans, contingency plans, secret plans, diplomatic framework documents, super-double-secret-contingency plans and all the rest. Why? Because I would have them, that’s why.

This brings to mind a quote by John Adams: Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws.

Regardless of whether plans exist or not, what are we, the denizens of the cheap seats, to make of this peculiar situation?

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I then went on to speculate that if one were a DC power broker and knew about Peak Oil and wanted a face-saving way out of it that engineering a global economic downturn would be one way of avoiding reality and buying time. Given that this is the path of the weasel you know it had some purchase in certain political circles.

At any rate, the global downturn happened and we'll never know to what extent it was accidental, assisted, or engineered.

So there's our historical flashback! Please take the time to re-read the Cheney quote above and really let the implications of those words sink in.

One indication of the continued importance of Middle East oil is the continuing presence of 2-3 US carrier groups cruising the Indian Ocean at any given time. On carrier group probably has the fire power of any but a very few nations on earth. In a crisis I have absolutely no doubt they would swoop in to take control of the strategic oil lines and facilities of the Middle East, perhaps including Iran. This is a very scary prospect that I don't think is discussed enough, although I'm sure it is discussed among tptb.

I can't find a link at the moment, but I believe I remember a British Member of Parliament asking if we would have invaded Iraq if their primary export was bananas. Interesting when you look at it that way.

This also raises the question of just how independent our oil companies are...If we are fighting a war over Peak Oil and have engineered a recession to distract the world from Peak Oil, we obviously place great political importance on oil. I am sure that we would desire to (covertly) "manage" our oil companies if we are willing to go to war.

This also raises the question of just how independent our oil companies are...If we are fighting a war over Peak Oil and have engineered a recession to distract the world from Peak Oil, we obviously place great political importance on oil. I am sure that we would desire to (covertly) "manage" our oil companies if we are willing to go to war.

It might be a productive thought experiment to think not of scheming American private and public entities, more or less independent/managed, but of a profitable and controlling global system, an integrated arrangement to take in, hold, process and put out, regardless of costs to other beings. Its authority to engage in wars is a relic and takes maximum advantage of there will always be wars and rumors of wars. Our government's revolving door is part of the system.

Of further interest is Mr Cheney's proximity to the circles of power earlier in the 1970s.

I speculate that Mr Cheney would have learnt the implications of US Peak Oil in 1972 at the hand of Nixon and Ford - perhaps next participating (first as an apparatchik and then in the oil "bidness") as US switched its foreign policy machinery to securing the giant Saudi feilds under Reagan and Bush I.

Mr Reagan's main foreign policy acheivement IMO was to maintain the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf, and together with the pious Saudi's and Mrs Thatcher, herself "high on the hog" with North Sea Oil - the fall of the Godless Soviets became a matter of beligerently waiting them out.

Anyways ....without being too "lyrical" - Mr Cheney's pursuit of Iraq (during the Gulf war and the Iraq war) can perhaps be viewed in light of a drive to repeat something like what had been acheived in the 70s and 80s with the Saudi's. The energy return on investment (EROI) was going to be higher - requiring a bloody regime change. However, the costs had to be weighed against the benefits to the US of buying a few more years by opening up the world's second or third largest national reserves of oil.

From what you cite above Chris from 1999 - we read arguably the most influential individual of the last 50 years at his peak as he lays out the case.

According to an American farmer of the 18th century, his wife said to him:

These Englishmen are strange people; because they can live upon what they call bank notes, without working, they think that all the world can do the same. This goodly country never would have been tilled and cleared with these notes. [I]f they have no trees to cut down, they have gold in abundance, they say; for they rake it and scrape it from all parts near and far. I have often heard my grandfather tell how they live there by writing. By writing they send this cargo unto us, that to the West, and the other to the East Indies. But, James, thee knowest that it is not by writing that we shall pay the blacksmith, the minister, the weaver, the tailor and the English shop.

Letters from an American Farmer by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur was first printed in 1783.